Clockwork Puzzle on reddit!

Time flies dear Eigens,

From moderators to Pao?

Clockwork Puzzle is soon going to be one month old and our player number is still around 200, with no increase in sight 🙁 So we decided to leave the game in the hands of one of the most critical, difficult to please, and (after their recent revolt with 160K signatures we can say surely call them so) the most vocal internet community: reddit!

But before digging further into that 😉 , let’s finish up Clockwork Puzzle analytics, last chapter: Success evaluation

Who is the better puzzle solver?

As you would remember we have already gone through the number of players in iOS vs Android breakdown, or Flurry analytics player personality types analytics in the last weeks, it is now time to get into real success measures. This week we will be using again the data we have gathered with Flurry analytics.

iOS User Path vs. Android User Path

As you can see, we have drawn here what players do when the session starts and they hit their first level of the day: Possible options are winning the level, losing the level, obviously, but also restarting the level before losing, possibly when you understand that you won’t win :-), as well as going back to main menu, or simply closing the app, or so-called end session. It is clear from above data that Android users are seeing that golden win symbol “Well done!” far more often than iOS players! Yay, success for the little Droid! But wait, other interesting behaviour patterns appear as well:

After a win

Android players seem to enjoy a winning streak: After winning the level at the beginning of a session, they right away start the next level 91% of the time, and show 44% success in winning also this next level (data not shown). So, in over simplified terms, Android users are more likely to keep playing as long as they win and win as long as they play. Hence we can say rewarded practice makes perfect in the puzzle world too.

This blogpost loves you.

Instead a win means slightly less to iOS players in terms of motivation to carry on (only 85% go on to the next level). They tend to more frequently play again the same level (huh?), or simply quit. But what happens to iOS players that win and keep playing? Not surprisingly, success rates are also lower than Droids: On the face of this new level challenge only 35% of the iOS players score a win. So we get it, it is fun to win, or better put, a player should win almost half the time to keep playing. As expected, nobody likes stalling. It is demotivating when it happens often, and likely to cause people to give up.. But what iOS players apparently do not notice is that, looking at the overall picture, their performance increase drastically the second time around: While at the initial session start they could pass their first level only 1 out of 4 times, if they continue to the next level it becomes success 1 out of 3 times. This is a lot better progress than the Android players who show at the first level of the session about 40% success and at the second level 44%. Still better though, so both groups are learning little by little at each session but iOS players are learning faster.

When we lose

Not everyone is a graceful loser, indeed. But Clockwork Puzzle player is different than what we imagine internet average is: At the level start, we see that only 5% of the android and only 6% of iOS users rage quit, i.e. they would end the session, close the app when they lose. These ratios are similar to how they behave after a win. It is also interesting to see that on the face of a lose, when that horrendous “Out of Toys!” sign appears at the first level of the session, 90% of both iOS and Android users would restart! Yay for grit! Keep at it y’all! Unfortunately, our Flurry settings don’t allow us to track these unstoppable players and see whether their next tries were indeed successful. We hope so, up to that 50-50 ratio that keeps them coming back, of course 😉

Obviously all this is a bit of an oversimplification. A serious data analysis would first require a lot more sessions than our about 3000 sessions, and would consider perhaps a level and user resolved version of the data and hopefully, it would include error bars 🙂

To the crazy ones

We doubted long before revealing this here but you should probably know: One advantage of having so few players is that player logs that also keep device model are very easy to follow. Let us explain with a scenario: If we see a log entry from an iPhone6 at 8pm starting the 16th level and after several attempts winning and ending a session, and another log entry next day again from an iPhone6 starting level 17th; it is easy to connect the dots. So sometimes we think we can follow the gameplay of some of you on a daily basis! It is super creepy, right? Think of an even worse scenario: you are a friend of one of us with a peculiar device, we meet you one day and say hey, wanna try our game? You are perhaps not very interested but out of politeness say something like “yea, I will try as soon as I can”. We don’t buy that of course and ask you to download and even play a couple of levels there and then. We could, then in principle, follow your device in the next days to come and see how you have been doing in the game, or if you have ever played, or if you were on wifi or not, hence at work or at school or out partaying downtown.

As you imagine we have not done that, but even without checking carefully some devices and entry logs were remarkable: So without any further ado, some fun stuff out of event logs and cheers to the crazy ones who played and became so noticable in our logs:

June 12th, about 6am central european time, dear iPhone 5s (GSM+CDMA), you were the first one ever to reach level 30, and you gave up after 6 tries, and missed the chance of being the very first one to finish the game both on Android and iOS

Dear Apple iPhone 4 (GSM), we have never seen someone with such determination: it has been almost a week and you keep coming back for level 19! Session after session we watch you and with that inspiration we come back to our VR projects and fight against the most annoying incompatible version issues in Unity, Oculus and GearVR software development kits. We are impressed, so much so that we decided to make a new release to be able add a hint to that very difficult level. Contact us and we will add you to the credits of this game and many others to come! Some of us personally wanna name a first born after you.

And you, Samsung Galaxy Note 3 LTE, we did not forget about you. With you we have learned that either the game controls are very non-intuitive or our tutorial probably sucks or as everyone you don’t read tutorials, or perhaps all of the above. It was in the very first days of the release and you were the player whom it took the most attempts to pass level 1. But alas, you were unstoppable afterwards! Except a couple of exceptions, you flew to level 8 like a breeze. And that is when we lost you. We waved goodbye, with your lesson on game controls in our hearts.

Back to reddit

We are all truly grateful for everyone who have played our game and gave it a go and let us know of their feedback. Overall we had a great time making the game, mostly, but also enjoyed the post-mortem analysis. However all would have been so much more fun if we had more players, more data, more people to share Ago’s and lost loved ones memories, and perhaps even developers that want to work together with us on making it a better game and extending its scope. With this possibility in mind we went to GameDev subreddit and occupied the Feedback Friday post! Feedback Friday is a special post in this subreddit where developers often exchange feedback on each others’ games. We were lucky to try out some really cute games ourselves and even had some few but awesome feedback!

Overall, reddit was not as scary as we imagined. Some tough love, but hey, we needed it. As you can read here the reactions to our store pages were consistent: Make it clear, and fancier! Apparently it is not apparent on store pages what the game is about and how it is played. Another feedback we heard on reddit as well as IRL is the nonexistent manual controls for skipping or slowing down the silent movie-like story scenes. We hear you. But we cannot promise much, as these days we are truly immersed in Virtual Reality 😉 but for sure we will come back with a new release to tackle those open loops. And the more players we have, the sooner that will be.

Until then, keep spreading the word dear Eigens and keep trying to reach further levels in the game. There are some really cute levels and toys you have not seen! Believe us when we say it, we know exactly at which level you are playing 😉